The Science of Regional and Global Change Putting Knowledge to Work (2001) / Chapter Skim
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2 At the Agency Level
2 At the Agency Level
Pages 5-11
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From page 5... ...
The recent progress of science and technology gives real reason for hope that the nation's environmental challenges can be successfully addressed. The challenge of sustainable development the reconciliation of society's developmental goals with its environmental limits—can only be met by advances in basic knowledge, flow of information, and technological capabilities, together with the poetical will and social capacity to make use of them.
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From page 6... ...
These strategies must incorporate fundamental research on such understudied issues as consumption, social transitions, and carrying capacity. They must bung together both global and local perspectives from the natural and social sciences so that the multiple cumulative environmental stresses of a particular location can be understood, resulting risks identified, and coping strategies formulated.
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From page 7... ...
The NRC has described each of these issues in an extensive series of reports over the past several years, including the lack of long-term, sustained climate and ecological observing systems and the lack of societal and economic data necessary to assess environmental challenges in an integrated fashion. Dealing with numerous simultaneous environmental and societal stressors wid demand a new level of integration of agency programs.
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From page 8... ...
To what extent have ecosystems changed? These observations are critical for iniiin~li~ing and testing models used for environmental prediction and for developing and testing key hypotheses such as: To what extent are climate and ecosystem changes due to natural variation, to what extent to human activities such as land use change for forestry and agriculture, and to what extent to human activities that affect atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, soot, and sulfate aerosols?
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From page 9... ...
From the search for understanding microbial processes In Antarctic ice to tracing contaminant effects in the Arctic ocean, from the investigation of nanoscale interactions on mineral surfaces to the influence of solar flares, from the properties of DNA to animal migration patterns, from the physics of the oceans and atmosphere to the behavior of the climate all are part of the search to understand earth's life forms and their complex relationship to the physical habitat. That search can be propelled by new tools for discovery, including new genomic methods, increased observational and computational capacities, and more sensitive and versatile analytical instrumentation.
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From page 10... ...
The need to design efficient assessment processes that effectively balance scientific credibility and political acceptability is particularly acute in the realm of transnational or global environmental issues. An important result of the observations and analyses conducted over the hrst 10 years of the U.S.
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From page 11... ...
Wherefore, it is time to get started on programs of regional and sectoral multiple-stress research and demonstration projects. Support is needed to encourage the new partnerships and integration of observing and information systems required to build decision support capability.
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